I 100% expect Social Security to stop being useful about the time I get it, entirely thanks to the ongoing lying about CPI being escalated as inflation rises. I'd be surprised if we actually see hyperinflation, but 10% inflation with a 7% official inflation for 5-7 years would fix a great many of the governments financial woes (or delay them longer than the typical time a politician stays in office), and so I fully expect that. I'm saving not just for my own retirement, but to help carry my parents when their Social Security checks become so much paper.
Never invest in a financial firm - liars and cheats the lot of them (I say this, but somehow I still trust Buffett - feel free to point and laugh if BRK collapses) . But the majority of publically held corporations actually do useful things unrelated to money manipulation. People will still want pizza delivered, uniforms washed, a new refrigerator, HVAC repair and on and on. A rough couple of years? Definitely - especially as you point out with contracts (OTOH, mortgages become free) - but not societal collapse.
I don't see a USD collapse as that big a deal for the US. We'd figure something else out to use as currency and keep going. There could be a rough year or two while states figured out a tax strategy, but that's about it. (Everything important for day-to-day government operations is done at the state/local level, but most of the money that pays for it goes through the federal government first, which would be the issue).
It would really suck to be dependent on Social Security when the USD collapsed, but the US has done well though non-government charities before, and I'm sure we can again.
Investments stock and commodities are worth what the company or goods are worth - the dollar value (or new currency value) will adjust over time regardless of where the dollar goes. Bonds would be a mistake, though, and sovereign bonds doubly so.
Sure, but it's processed in an objective way much like most measurements in science: with a known error bar with normal distribution, by methods grounded in the underlying physics that have themselves undergone peer review, and that aren't being "adjusted" after the fact to fit theory.
There's a real sense in which hypersonic missiles are an alternative to nukes: bunker busting. To bust a deep bunker (think 10+ meters of concrete, itself deep underground) is no easy task. A nuke works, but nuke ground bursts are particularly nasty (airbursts have limited and contained fallout, ground bursts toss fallout high up into the atmosphere to spread with the wind). Get a kinetic weapon up to Mach 10 and that works too.
There were plans at one point to drop heavy penetrators (old 5" gun barrels from decommissioned battleships IIRC, very hard steel) from orbit if needed, but that was barely doable and quite expensive. Still, it shows the magnitude of the problem.
All the big players have signed "no nukes in space" treaties, of course, but you may be right that they have them anyhow, much to your point about secret testing.
Sure, or perhaps I should say "naturally". But I was just pointing out that the whole "corporations are people" thing is commonly misunderstood: it's just the idea that, by default, any law that applies to a person also applies to a corporation.
OK, obviously there' selection bias in play here, but I've never worked for a large dev shop that preferred HBB workers over workers that didn't require sponsorship. There are certainly H1B-only shops that exist (in defiance of the law) to exploit young workers, but those are contract-only shops (they only do contract work for other businesses). If you're keeping it legal, H1B workers aren't any cheaper (including legal costs).
I have worked for places that had 80-90% of their developers working in India and/or China. That saves money. I'm happy to compete with anyone who works and lives in the US - we all have the same expenses (and I don't send half my paycheck back home).
None of which has to do with manufacturing, of course. Tesla does use some H1Bs for software development (friend of mine's wife works there), but AFAIK they're like most places and pay competitively.
All you can assess in an interview is stuff tied to coding problems: data structures and algorithms, mostly. I personally use a coding question that leads to a discussion in which I try to determine whether the candidate understands how a hash table works (everyone seems to blindly use them, but surprisingly many don't understand how they're implemented with all that implies).
At previous companies, we've phone screened based on knowing the simplest things about pointers (which culled nearly half, but I'm currently in a Java shop so we don't care), and we've also done a debugging-centric coding problem as an interview test. (Here's a laptop and someone to help you with anything you're unfamiliar with, solve the following problem in 2 hours. The solution was just a few lines of code, but the problem was set up where you'd need to discover stuff through debugging or some sort of experimentation.)
At the large companies I've worked at, interviews are general 1 manager session asking resume-related questions, and a set of timeslots with engineers where the candidate demonstrates coding ability on the whiteboard. We all try to come up with questions that reveal fundamentals over playing "compiler trivial pursuit".
Only in the sense that we're not going to write two entire legal codes, one that says "person" and one that says "corporation" in every law. And a good thing too, or our current zoo of congresscritters would "forget" to mirror laws saying that "a person or persons" can't do X with laws restricting corporations.
For criminal law individuals are usually still guilty of whatever act they did, regardless of employment. However, in cases where there's no individual equivalent (e.g., knowingly endangering people by policy-making), the corporate equivalent of the criminal justice system is massive court awards for gross negligence (or, more rarely, fines so large the shareholders say "ouch").
Many people are self-taught, not just "coding" but also computer science. It's not like you can't read a few books to get the underpinnings that will ever matter on the job.
OTOH, I've interviewed quite a few people with degrees but only very shallow coding skills (no real understanding of pointers or debugging), and who still didn't have strong fundamentals in computer science. I seriously wonder what some schools teach for four years.
But none of that really matters past the first few years in industry. Trying to get that first job without a degree is a heck of a thing, and of course it will pay less, but after 5 years or so it just doesn't matter.
What would you expect to happen if there are correctable errors in the data and the theories are correct?
What would you expect to happen if there are correctable errors and the theories are false, but the researcher was dodgy? Same result.
Data that doesn't allow you to distinguish these cases isn't scientific. That's the difference between "evidence" and "pleasing story", after all. Reproducibility is everything: the scientific method is built on the foundation that a skeptical opponent of your research can repeat your experiment (or measurement) and be forced to come around. If you're "adjusting" your data, the methodology you use is very much part of this process. The raw data should be presented, the method of adjustment should be presented, and the rationale for the method should itself stand against skepticism. (E.g., if a ground station went from rural to urban over time, others can compare similar situations and see if your adjustment was appropriate).
But if the raw data is destroyed? Well, pardon my skepticism.
(And if you think scientific researchers are perfect angels, not humans vulnerable to bias or outright cheating, take a look at the reproducibility of biochem synthesis journals some time. Eesh.)
The ground station temperature data has been quite thoroughly manipulated, always "adjusted" in the direction of confirming the theories of the researcher making the adjustment, Pardon my skepticism about that data.
The satellite data, however, has no such shadow over it. It's good, solid data - the sort of thing one expects in science. But now there's this new satellite data that must be "processed" to be understood. If it's just photographic evidence like ice coverage, then great - image processing techniques are commonly understood, and no one's going to be photoshopping in extra ice to create a fake trend. But if there's infrared data that researchers must "adjust", and then extend temperature graphs of "satellite data" backwards, then I'll be annoyed that the data source I trust has been mixed with adjusted data.
IE has been decent since 9, and good since 10. No reason not to use it these days. I like the UI better than the latest from FF or Chrome, though I hear good things about Pale Moon - need to try that soon.
The dirty tricks you listed all take the same form: excluding people from the market. If you believe that we all have a fundamental right to buy and sell and provide services and otherwise participate in commerce, then the only discussion is how best to approach that ideal. Laws that grant monopolies or create significant barriers to entry are wholly bad under that lens.
Of course there's a tension there between that freedom and a different set of dirty tricks: fraud and unsafe products. There's very little dissent, outside of the extreme corners of libertarianism, that regulations to insure some sort of minimum quality/safety are good in principle. But it's quite odd how, whenever someone suggests that the market is unduly restricted by heavy-handed government monopoly granting, the speaker is accused of wanting to destroy safety regulations.
If you want a market where it's easy for anyone to participate, you want both minimum-possible government barriers to entry and a significant government role in fraud prevention and safety. It's not a "more vs less government" argument at all, really. That's just a distraction. The real question is "given that we need some government role in product safety and fraud prevention, how do we prevent that grant of power to the government from being twisted and corrupted into monopoly-granting?"
I think you're off by a few orders of magnitude. This would be a much bigger deal than the year without a summer, which caused mass starvation. The short term damage would be a significant percentage of everything starving to death. There would be next to no crop land left in all of North America for decades, perhaps centuries. Depending on how much ejecta there was, it might well tip us over into the next ice age (well, technically, the next glaciation period in the ongoing Quaternary ice age).
And if you're worried about climate change, a bit of warming's got nothing on the damage the return of the glaciers would do.
This feels like a cold and calculated enrootment of evil and suppression.
How so? Is this just a mindless anti-American rant, or did you have a point?
This is a pre-pay card, so it's not like it's a devilish scheme to tempt the innocent into the evils of debt, and it's is in a country where is can be difficult to use a credit card because there's little trust that the card wasn't stolen. This is a clever solution: for once, the merchant will actually see a picture ID associated with the card! When's the last time that happened? Should cut back on fraud a bit, and make day-to-day commerce a bit easier.
The real question is: will there be some way to easily transfer money between people directly, using the cards. That would put Nigeria one up over the west!
But we're talking about a free online service. Why would you imagine the service provider has some moral duty to keep providing it indefinitely? "indirectly fund a franchise" - really? They owe you because you took their gift? Entitled twit.
Nothing ever entitles you to future work from another. You can have a contract that sets some penalty they'll pay you if they don't do something, but nothing can obligate another to keep providing a service. (You do know slavery is out now, right?)
Ahh, that's less silly. But still, someone must be doing something N^2 there (which, OK, might be understandable given a sufficiently compressed delivery timeline and an AI written from scratch - I'd likely also do something N^2 as a first pass before optimizing, just to make sure the behaviors looked sane).
Man, you're so right: Fox News will totally sabotage Obama's re-election chances over this! News of the complete disaster which is the president's foreign policy will be bumped below the fold for 24-hour coverage of "office no one cares about"!
No one in either party's base gives a fuck about the gender or orientation of the holder of some office they've never heard of and will never care about. Maybe a few geeks care about this? Maybe?
Slashdot Mirror
I 100% expect Social Security to stop being useful about the time I get it, entirely thanks to the ongoing lying about CPI being escalated as inflation rises. I'd be surprised if we actually see hyperinflation, but 10% inflation with a 7% official inflation for 5-7 years would fix a great many of the governments financial woes (or delay them longer than the typical time a politician stays in office), and so I fully expect that. I'm saving not just for my own retirement, but to help carry my parents when their Social Security checks become so much paper.
Never invest in a financial firm - liars and cheats the lot of them (I say this, but somehow I still trust Buffett - feel free to point and laugh if BRK collapses) . But the majority of publically held corporations actually do useful things unrelated to money manipulation. People will still want pizza delivered, uniforms washed, a new refrigerator, HVAC repair and on and on. A rough couple of years? Definitely - especially as you point out with contracts (OTOH, mortgages become free) - but not societal collapse.
I don't see a USD collapse as that big a deal for the US. We'd figure something else out to use as currency and keep going. There could be a rough year or two while states figured out a tax strategy, but that's about it. (Everything important for day-to-day government operations is done at the state/local level, but most of the money that pays for it goes through the federal government first, which would be the issue).
It would really suck to be dependent on Social Security when the USD collapsed, but the US has done well though non-government charities before, and I'm sure we can again.
Investments stock and commodities are worth what the company or goods are worth - the dollar value (or new currency value) will adjust over time regardless of where the dollar goes. Bonds would be a mistake, though, and sovereign bonds doubly so.
Sure, but it's processed in an objective way much like most measurements in science: with a known error bar with normal distribution, by methods grounded in the underlying physics that have themselves undergone peer review, and that aren't being "adjusted" after the fact to fit theory.
There's a real sense in which hypersonic missiles are an alternative to nukes: bunker busting. To bust a deep bunker (think 10+ meters of concrete, itself deep underground) is no easy task. A nuke works, but nuke ground bursts are particularly nasty (airbursts have limited and contained fallout, ground bursts toss fallout high up into the atmosphere to spread with the wind). Get a kinetic weapon up to Mach 10 and that works too.
There were plans at one point to drop heavy penetrators (old 5" gun barrels from decommissioned battleships IIRC, very hard steel) from orbit if needed, but that was barely doable and quite expensive. Still, it shows the magnitude of the problem.
All the big players have signed "no nukes in space" treaties, of course, but you may be right that they have them anyhow, much to your point about secret testing.
Sure, or perhaps I should say "naturally". But I was just pointing out that the whole "corporations are people" thing is commonly misunderstood: it's just the idea that, by default, any law that applies to a person also applies to a corporation.
OK, obviously there' selection bias in play here, but I've never worked for a large dev shop that preferred HBB workers over workers that didn't require sponsorship. There are certainly H1B-only shops that exist (in defiance of the law) to exploit young workers, but those are contract-only shops (they only do contract work for other businesses). If you're keeping it legal, H1B workers aren't any cheaper (including legal costs).
I have worked for places that had 80-90% of their developers working in India and/or China. That saves money. I'm happy to compete with anyone who works and lives in the US - we all have the same expenses (and I don't send half my paycheck back home).
None of which has to do with manufacturing, of course. Tesla does use some H1Bs for software development (friend of mine's wife works there), but AFAIK they're like most places and pay competitively.
All you can assess in an interview is stuff tied to coding problems: data structures and algorithms, mostly. I personally use a coding question that leads to a discussion in which I try to determine whether the candidate understands how a hash table works (everyone seems to blindly use them, but surprisingly many don't understand how they're implemented with all that implies).
At previous companies, we've phone screened based on knowing the simplest things about pointers (which culled nearly half, but I'm currently in a Java shop so we don't care), and we've also done a debugging-centric coding problem as an interview test. (Here's a laptop and someone to help you with anything you're unfamiliar with, solve the following problem in 2 hours. The solution was just a few lines of code, but the problem was set up where you'd need to discover stuff through debugging or some sort of experimentation.)
At the large companies I've worked at, interviews are general 1 manager session asking resume-related questions, and a set of timeslots with engineers where the candidate demonstrates coding ability on the whiteboard. We all try to come up with questions that reveal fundamentals over playing "compiler trivial pursuit".
Only in the sense that we're not going to write two entire legal codes, one that says "person" and one that says "corporation" in every law. And a good thing too, or our current zoo of congresscritters would "forget" to mirror laws saying that "a person or persons" can't do X with laws restricting corporations.
For criminal law individuals are usually still guilty of whatever act they did, regardless of employment. However, in cases where there's no individual equivalent (e.g., knowingly endangering people by policy-making), the corporate equivalent of the criminal justice system is massive court awards for gross negligence (or, more rarely, fines so large the shareholders say "ouch").
Many people are self-taught, not just "coding" but also computer science. It's not like you can't read a few books to get the underpinnings that will ever matter on the job.
OTOH, I've interviewed quite a few people with degrees but only very shallow coding skills (no real understanding of pointers or debugging), and who still didn't have strong fundamentals in computer science. I seriously wonder what some schools teach for four years.
But none of that really matters past the first few years in industry. Trying to get that first job without a degree is a heck of a thing, and of course it will pay less, but after 5 years or so it just doesn't matter.
What would you expect to happen if there are correctable errors in the data and the theories are correct?
What would you expect to happen if there are correctable errors and the theories are false, but the researcher was dodgy? Same result.
Data that doesn't allow you to distinguish these cases isn't scientific. That's the difference between "evidence" and "pleasing story", after all. Reproducibility is everything: the scientific method is built on the foundation that a skeptical opponent of your research can repeat your experiment (or measurement) and be forced to come around. If you're "adjusting" your data, the methodology you use is very much part of this process. The raw data should be presented, the method of adjustment should be presented, and the rationale for the method should itself stand against skepticism. (E.g., if a ground station went from rural to urban over time, others can compare similar situations and see if your adjustment was appropriate).
But if the raw data is destroyed? Well, pardon my skepticism.
(And if you think scientific researchers are perfect angels, not humans vulnerable to bias or outright cheating, take a look at the reproducibility of biochem synthesis journals some time. Eesh.)
You still have QA people? What luxury!
Well, as a skeptic, here's what bothers me:
The ground station temperature data has been quite thoroughly manipulated, always "adjusted" in the direction of confirming the theories of the researcher making the adjustment, Pardon my skepticism about that data.
The satellite data, however, has no such shadow over it. It's good, solid data - the sort of thing one expects in science. But now there's this new satellite data that must be "processed" to be understood. If it's just photographic evidence like ice coverage, then great - image processing techniques are commonly understood, and no one's going to be photoshopping in extra ice to create a fake trend. But if there's infrared data that researchers must "adjust", and then extend temperature graphs of "satellite data" backwards, then I'll be annoyed that the data source I trust has been mixed with adjusted data.
Better option: use startpage or duckduckgo - same search, no creepy stalker peering in through your window.
IE has been decent since 9, and good since 10. No reason not to use it these days. I like the UI better than the latest from FF or Chrome, though I hear good things about Pale Moon - need to try that soon.
The dirty tricks you listed all take the same form: excluding people from the market. If you believe that we all have a fundamental right to buy and sell and provide services and otherwise participate in commerce, then the only discussion is how best to approach that ideal. Laws that grant monopolies or create significant barriers to entry are wholly bad under that lens.
Of course there's a tension there between that freedom and a different set of dirty tricks: fraud and unsafe products. There's very little dissent, outside of the extreme corners of libertarianism, that regulations to insure some sort of minimum quality/safety are good in principle. But it's quite odd how, whenever someone suggests that the market is unduly restricted by heavy-handed government monopoly granting, the speaker is accused of wanting to destroy safety regulations.
If you want a market where it's easy for anyone to participate, you want both minimum-possible government barriers to entry and a significant government role in fraud prevention and safety. It's not a "more vs less government" argument at all, really. That's just a distraction. The real question is "given that we need some government role in product safety and fraud prevention, how do we prevent that grant of power to the government from being twisted and corrupted into monopoly-granting?"
I think you're off by a few orders of magnitude. This would be a much bigger deal than the year without a summer, which caused mass starvation. The short term damage would be a significant percentage of everything starving to death. There would be next to no crop land left in all of North America for decades, perhaps centuries. Depending on how much ejecta there was, it might well tip us over into the next ice age (well, technically, the next glaciation period in the ongoing Quaternary ice age).
And if you're worried about climate change, a bit of warming's got nothing on the damage the return of the glaciers would do.
This feels like a cold and calculated enrootment of evil and suppression.
How so? Is this just a mindless anti-American rant, or did you have a point?
This is a pre-pay card, so it's not like it's a devilish scheme to tempt the innocent into the evils of debt, and it's is in a country where is can be difficult to use a credit card because there's little trust that the card wasn't stolen. This is a clever solution: for once, the merchant will actually see a picture ID associated with the card! When's the last time that happened? Should cut back on fraud a bit, and make day-to-day commerce a bit easier.
The real question is: will there be some way to easily transfer money between people directly, using the cards. That would put Nigeria one up over the west!
I've known some backwoods types, but when you start confusing a deer's hindquarters and a woman's pelvis, it's time to get into town more!
You can buy flashcards you know. Some have colorful animals!
I'm sure there's an XKCD on that.
But we're talking about a free online service. Why would you imagine the service provider has some moral duty to keep providing it indefinitely? "indirectly fund a franchise" - really? They owe you because you took their gift? Entitled twit.
Nothing ever entitles you to future work from another. You can have a contract that sets some penalty they'll pay you if they don't do something, but nothing can obligate another to keep providing a service. (You do know slavery is out now, right?)
Ahh, that's less silly. But still, someone must be doing something N^2 there (which, OK, might be understandable given a sufficiently compressed delivery timeline and an AI written from scratch - I'd likely also do something N^2 as a first pass before optimizing, just to make sure the behaviors looked sane).
If you had an actual point to make, we all missed it.
Man, you're so right: Fox News will totally sabotage Obama's re-election chances over this! News of the complete disaster which is the president's foreign policy will be bumped below the fold for 24-hour coverage of "office no one cares about"!
No one in either party's base gives a fuck about the gender or orientation of the holder of some office they've never heard of and will never care about. Maybe a few geeks care about this? Maybe?